Senator-Elect Ayotte Named Top “Winner” of 2010 Election
November 4, 2010US News and World Report’s Washington Whispers has named Senator-elect Kelly Ayotte as the top winner of Tuesday’s election. She joins Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS), Sarah Palin and likely House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) as winners. Here is what had to say about her win yesterday:
Winners
1. New Hampshire Sen.-elect Kelly Ayotte. She’s a rare New England conservative who is pro-life, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, anti-stimulus, anti-cap and trade, and anti-healthcare reform. Senate GOP leaders are already calling her their “rising star.”
Not too shabby!
TimothyHorrigan
Nov 4, 2010
Rep. Hodes spent his entire second Congressional term running very hard for the Senate… and he got 37% of the vote. That’s about 10% more than he would have gotten had he done nothing at all. You can get 25% or so of the vote just by being a major party nominee, as the hapless Alvin Greene proved in South Carolina. The fact that you can’t point to any specific cause for Hodes’s defeat (he was not that bad a candidate & there were no major gaffes & the only scandal of the race was on Ayotte’s side) is not much of a consolation for his supporters.
Kelly Ayotte was the candidate who beat him, so maybe she was indeed the biggest winner of the cycle. It doesn’t seem big to us on the ground in NH because she was the frontrunner all along and because she is not the world’s most charismatic candidate.
Matt Suermann
Nov 4, 2010
Tim,
Thanks for the spin. So you’re saying that Hodes “earned” only 12% more of the vote with the millions spent by him and Dem allies? Doesn’t sound like a good investment on his part…
Can’t point to any specific cause?!
Could it be the scorched earth campaign he ran, essentially spending more time throwing acid vs giving voters a reason to vote for him, the laughable claim that he’s the fiscal conservative in the race
TimothyHorrigan
Nov 4, 2010
What I was saying was, Hodes got beat bad. I give credit to Ayotte for a strong campaign: it wasn’t exciting, but it was effective. Hodes was not a bad candidate per se, (he was more than sufficiently smart, personable, eloquent, etc.)— but he ran a bad campaign. That’s my specific cause: he ran a bad campaign; along with the fact that this was a bad election cycle for his side.
The millions of dollars spent on Hodes’s campaign absolutely turned out to be a bad investment. He could have stayed and ran for his Congressional seat, but he probably would have lost that race as well.
Starfire
Nov 5, 2010
She stuck to the issues. He did not. He could not run on his voting record because that was absolute poison.
The better candidate won. Deal with it TH. You make all the excuses you want for why he lost. He lost simply because he did not represent the majority on NH voters.
New Hampshire
Nov 7, 2010
Not to mention that while he was not doing the people’s business he refused to meet with them time after time.